Tesla In China: Promised Land, Huge Risks...Or Both?

What risk? Worst case scenario is disappointing sales but the Model S is far too much the sort of automotive gadget the Chinese rich are likely to pick up in droves for that to be a likely scenario. The knock off risk argument makes no sense. What's stopping the Chinese from buying a Model S in the US, cart it off to the motherland and reverse engineer it? Nothing except in practice it's not that easy to translate the findings from a stripped high-tech product like this into a comparable product. So it seems to me that Tesla and the Chinese government need each other; Tesla needs favourable terms for market access and the Chinese need companies with the technology that could help them solve their oil dependence/pollution problems some day